Word: sihanouk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...suffering in the past decade than this once tranquil and fertile land. Though neutral in the early years of the Viet Nam War, Cambodia unwittingly became a base for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, and the target of savage U.S. bombings. Its popular Chief of State, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was overthrown by Premier Lon Nol in 1970. Lon Nol was in turn deposed by Pol Pot when the Khmer Rouge, as the Cambodian Communist forces are called, took over the country in 1975. After four years of mass terror and murder under the Khmer Rouge the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia...
...Sihanouk may regard Vietnamese colonialism as evil No. 2, but the non-Communist nations of Southeast Asia are as hostile to Hanoi's puppet regime in Phnom-Penh as they are to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Viet Nam has been repeatedly rebuffed in its efforts to have the legitimacy of the Heng Samrin regime endorsed by the world's major powers. Indeed, only the Soviet Union, its satellites and a few other smaller countries have recognized the present Phnom-Penh government. Hanoi suffered a particularly humiliating defeat in September when the U.N. General Assembly...
From his headquarters in North Korea, exiled Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who adroitly juggled the perennially factious forces in Cambodia before his ouster in 1970, announced that he was launching a new effort to return his country to political neutrality. The Prince, who may be the only figure with enough universal appeal to unite the country, said that he was establishing a non-Communist guerrilla force as an alternative to both the Pol Pot and the Heng Samrin regimes...
Leaning heavily on material in William Shawcross's highly critical book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, Frost disputed Kissinger's contentions that Prince Sihanouk tacitly supported the bombing of North Vietnamese "sanctuaries," that there was no danger of civilian casualties, and that the U.S. had not violated Cambodian neutrality. Replied Kissinger: "It is an absurdity. . . to say that a country [North Viet Nam] can occupy part of another country, kill your people and that then you are violating its neutrality when you respond against the foreign troops that are on that 'neutral' territory...
...even begin to arm him for weeks after North Vietnamese troops were ravaging a neutral country. The option of Lon Nol's restoring Cambodia's neutrality did not exist; it had been explicitly rejected by Le Duc Tho on April 4, 1970. And by then Sihanouk was no longer in a position to be neutralist. The real prospect before us, therefore, was exactly what the quoted paragraph describes as the most likely outcome: the reopening of Sihanoukville, a government in Phnom-Penh dominated by Hanoi and reopened sanctuaries now comprising all of eastern Cambodia. Where I differ sharply...